How emotions become memories (AKA the building blocks of your personality)
By: Aaron Mitchum
Most of life is based on emotions, memories and predictions. In fact, every day you are telling the story of your life without even knowing it. Here’s how it works. We have seven basic emotions: anger, sexual arousal, care, sadness, social joy, fear, and enthusiasm or anticipation (see Jaak Panksepp's work for more on this). We are born with these seven basic emotions because they motivate us to get what we need to survive. These basic emotions are below thinking and the foundation for all our other emotions. Because they have natural needs and instincts built into them basic emotions allow us to interact with the world without thinking. This is helpful because in the first part of life our basic emotions are all we have to navigate the world since our cortex (the thinking part of our brain) and our left hemisphere (the main part where speech comes from) are not fully developed yet.
As we take in the raw experience of life through our senses we experience emotions and those cause us to react with instincts and reflexes. The result of those reactions are remembered and we learn from them (privileging the results that felt most adaptive). After a while our brains transfer these experiences into long term memories and creates prediction models from them. This is to conserve energy. If we can build models that predict how to handle a certain kind of moment we can automate actions and reactions so we don’t have to re-invent the wheel every day. These patterns have to do with every day experiences like walking down the stairs or safety experiences like how to react to strangers vs loved ones, etc. In fact, we stop using feelings in those automated experiences. As long as the predictions our automated models are making keep being accurate we don’t even notice things. If our predictions fail however (e.g. the way we walk down stairs normally isn't working because the stairs are now icy), that’s when emotions come in. We start to feel in reaction to not knowing what to do. We have to feel our way through as the neuropsychoanalyst, Mark Solms is fond of saying.
To summarize, life excites feelings and feelings cause instinctual and reflexive reactions of which the results are remembered and then used to build prediction models to save energy. As those predictions cause feelings and behaviors to be repeated again and again the feelings and behaviors become habits and eventually engrained as automatic ways of being that we don’t think about any more. These are the building blocks of our personalities. So when you wonder why you use the tones of voice that you do on the phone vs in the store, why you react to good news and bad news in the ways that you do, why you judge or don’t judge the way you do, or why you hold your face and body posture in the ways that you do, you can know that it all comes from your history (i.e. how your genetics, dispositions and environments interacted with your basic emotions, instincts and reflexes to cause adaptive reactions which were remembered, repeated and automated).
A take away from all of this is, personalities are constructed. In addition, because our brains are changeable (thanks to neurplasticity [see Norman Doidge’s work] and the memory reconsolidation process [see Karim Nader's work]) it means that personalities are changeable too. The older we get and the more complexities our story has the harder major change can be but we do know that change is possible across the entire life span. Meaning, just because you have a personality type (a lot of people like to know their Enneagram number for example) it doesn’t mean that’s “who you are”. It means that’s what has been constructed. So if you struggle with your automatic reactions to life perhaps it’s hopeful to think that the end question is not necessarily, “what’s my story?” it’s potentially, “what do I want my story to be?".